Climate change curriculum research project

The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) is looking for volunteers to spare a few minutes to help identify significant opportunities for climate change education that can be made quickly within the current curriculum (England) and exam specifications.

Over the past few years, there have been many calls to improve standards of climate change education in our schools. However, there are already many opportunities within the current National Curriculum and GCSE exam specifications. The key to realising these opportunities is to demonstrate to the exam boards, teachers and students where the links are and to provide classroom-ready resources and support materials for teachers. This is where the Royal Meteorological Society needs your help.

If you work in any field connected with climate change, for example, climate science, adaptation, mitigation, communication, policy, finance or justice, to name a few, your help could be valuable. All that is needed is a few minutes in June/July to help identify where there are links to climate change in the current English secondary curriculum.

Each volunteer will be allocated one current GCSE specification or part of the National Curriculum. They will be asked to identify where climate change is already mentioned or where there is a clear opportunity for it to be mentioned. Opportunities can include using climate change as an example or application of what is already being taught or where it could be used as an exam question.

For some specifications, where there are few potential links, this will be a very quick task (5-10 minutes). For others, it might take a bit longer (30-60 minutes).

RMetS will draw together all the responses and work with teachers and students to decide which are the most relevant to current classroom teaching and most easily implemented. The project's next phase will be developing resources for teachers to support them in introducing the recommendations.

If you are interested in helping with this project, please contact Sylvia Knight, RMetS Head of Education education@rmets.org.

Although the current opportunities are with the English curriculum, we hope to extend this work to the other Nations of the UK in the near future. However, volunteers to this project do not have to be in England!